First Parish Bedford UU

Change is coming.

Unless you've been living without a television and haven't read a newspaper or surfed the internet -- or talked to anyone -- in a long time, you know that Change is coming.  That's “Change” with a capital “C”.  The old ways are falling away.  A new era is dawning.  The landscape is shifting more quickly than people could have imagined just a few short years ago.  

Oh, I'm not talking about the election, riveting though it was.  I'm talking about Climate Change.

You've seen the headlines and reports about melting polar ice sheets, heat waves, droughts, and other ills.  You understand how climate change touches on virtually any global issue that drives us as a community:  Poverty.  Famine.  Injustice.  Global insecurity.  War.

The list of Unitarian Universalist Principles includes a commitment to affirm and promote “The inherent worth and dignity of every person…  Justice, equity and compassion in human relations…  [and] the goal of a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”

If we understand that our actions with regard to global warming have real consequences for our “world community”, for people in far-off lands who will bear the brunt of cyclones and droughts and wars over increasingly scarce resources, we understand why we should care about climate change.

It isn't just that we need to understand the severity of the situation.  It's that we need to understand, to believe, that we can do something about it.  

Maybe it's the audacity of hope.  It's definitely a moral obligation to hope.  And to act on that hope.

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When my two children were born not long ago, I had been working for years on renewable energy in developing countries - helping to bring solar electricity to people in areas that had no power.  The work was rewarding, and I knew I was making a real difference in the lives of people in very underserved areas, people with so many challenges facing them.

But then climate change called to me.  Part of the reason I took a position with the Union of Concerned Scientists two years ago was my desire to stay closer to my young family.  But I also felt a serious need to ramp up my contribution to dealing with global warming.  

I knew that climate change brought so many threats that could wipe out so much of the progress and promise in the areas I lived in, worked in, loved.

And I knew that the U.S. was where the action was on climate change.  Or rather, where it needed to be.  

I've learned so much over these two years, not just about the seriousness of the challenge of climate change, but about the power of potential solutions.

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But we're not there yet - far from it.

So in the face of a challenge of such magnitude, where do we look for inspiration, where do we find reason for hope?  

When discussing our ability to deal with climate change, some point to the re-tooling of our economy during the second world war, and D-Day.  Some invoke the Civil Rights movement.  Some talk about our push to get a man on the moon.

I'd like to draw on experiences from farther back in the pages of history.

The book Bury the Chains, by American author and journalist Adam Hochschild, tells the story of the campaign that successfully ended British slavery.  Hochschild opens the book with a gathering in London in 1787 of a small group of men determined to rid their country of the blemish of slavery.  

Those men, and others of their time, felt a strong moral obligation to do something.  But they really may have had little reason to hope that they would be successful.  And they were unsure of how to tackle the problem, or even what goal to aim for - ending the slave trade?  Total abolition?

Hochschild goes on to describe the progress of the movement, and its development and use of many of the mass advocacy tools we use today:  sign-on letters and petitions, rallies, boycotts.

And Hochschild follows the movement to its success just 51 years later, and the astonishing transformation that followed.

“At the end of the eighteenth century,” Hochschild writes, “well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another” -- debt bondage or serfdom or outright slavery.

He goes on to say that “what is even more astonishing than the pervasiveness of slavery in the late 1700s is how swiftly it died.  By the end of the following century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere.  The antislavery movement had achieved its goal in little more than one lifetime.”

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Here in the 21st century, we have much less than one lifetime to get a handle on climate change, and our challenge is arguably exponentially more difficult.  

The Northeastern U.S. is already changing, in ways consistent with global warming.  Temperatures are up.  Snow pack and lack ice are decreasing.  Extreme summer heat is becoming more frequent.

In the Lyceum this morning I talked about a recent report on climate change in the Northeast, a collaboration between the Union of Concerned Scientists and dozens of independent scientists and economists from around the region.

The study looked at two different scenarios for how much global warming pollution this region might emit over the rest of this century.  

The higher scenario is a business-as-usual one, where we continue with our strong dependence on fossil fuels, with high related emissions.  

The other pathway -- the lower scenario -- is one we pursue by getting our act together, doing what we already know how to do, using the tools we've already invented, and inventing more.  

Each scenario gives a set of projections for temperature and precipitation.  

This study then took those projections and looked at their effects on key climate-sensitive sectors of our society here in the Northeast:  health in our cities, coastal areas, forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, and winter recreation.  

They suggest some sobering impacts under the lower scenario.  But they also show the much more serious impacts under the higher scenario.

By the end of this century, for example, Boston, which normally has around 10 days over 90 degrees in a summer, could experience more than 60 under that higher scenario.  Under the lower scenario, it might be half that.  And days over 100 degrees could grow from around 1 to over three weeks' worth under the higher scenario… or to a quarter of that under the lower.

The higher-emissions scenario could mean serious changes in what kinds of produce we grow in Massachusetts, how far we have to travel to ski, what our seasons look like, how much we would have to invest to protect our coasts and cities like Boston from rising seas and storms.

And the list goes on.

And that higher emission scenario is not a ceiling.  It could be worse.

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But it's equally true that the lower scenario is not a floor, that we can do better than that.  Indeed, aiming to reduce our country's heat-trapping emissions by 80% by the middle of the century -- as scientists call for -- would put us below that lower path.

Some of you know that the U.S. is responsible for almost one-quarter of the world's global warming emissions.  Less well known is the statistic for this region alone.  Just the nine states in our Northeast study alone emit more than all but six countries in the world.  More than all of Canada.  Or the United Kingdom.  Or South Korea.  

A stunning statistic, and you can choose to be appalled by that figure.  

Or you can see, as I do, the tremendous opportunity in it.  

Because that means that we, right here, can make a real contribution to addressing global warming if we can do something about our own contribution to the problem.

But that isn't a small “if”.


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If we think again about 1787 and compare our challenge to the ones faced by the abolitionist movement, though, we can consider what we have going for us, in getting this region, this country, to respond seriously and effectively to climate change.  

In terms of the economics, for example.  Slavery arguably had no clear replacement at the end of the 18th century.  Paying laborers at that scale was probably unthinkable for all but the most visionary.  And no one knew what the economic implications of ending slavery would be.

In Bury the Chains, Hochschild talks about Britons having to “organiz[e] against their own self-interest,” because of the money being made in supplying goods for slaves.  “Scholars estimate,” he writes, “that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the British people 1.8 percent of their annual national income over more than half a century…”

In that respect, we've got it easy.  Or at least easier.  And clearer.

There will be costs in fighting climate change.  But they are more than overshadowed by the likely costs of not fighting climate change.  … including right here in the Northeast - the implications of those effects that our study talked about, in areas that matter to each of us.  

And each day we get more data that show us just how serious those costs of inaction are.  And why the smart choice is getting moving on this issue now.

We also have recent evidence to show that we Americans respond positively to the right market signals.  With gas at $4 a gallon, how many of you drove a little less?  Americans as a whole did -- 12 billion fewer miles in June 2008 than in June 2007.  Public transit ridership climbed, sales of gas guzzlers plummeted.  

Evidence of that kind of response is good.  Because starting in January, Massachusetts and nine other states in this region will put a cap on carbon emissions from power plants, putting a price on carbon for the first time in the U.S.  Other regions of the country are following with even stronger climate change initiatives.  And the results of the election tell us that we will soon have a national price on carbon pollution.

We have reason to hope.

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We've also got increasing awareness for building momentum in the right direction.  

Hochschild describes how slavery was largely invisible to ordinary Britons, since it was mostly in far-off colonies.  

In our fight against climate change, we have advantages.  Climate change itself is bringing the message home.  

Those changes in the Northeast that I mentioned certainly have harmful effects, but they give us a leg up on our British forefathers.  People realize that winters really aren't as snowy, that the daffodils are arriving earlier, and that the mosquitoes are staying longer.  The threat is visible right here.

Clearly our understanding is evolving.

In other ways, too.  Our country has a strong history of using coal.  Even today we still get fully half of our electricity from coal plants.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid-1800s talked admiringly of coal.  “Every basket [of coal] is power and civilization,” he wrote.  “For coal is a portable climate.  It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle.”  

Many people now, though, understand that Emerson was more prescient -- and ironic -- than he could have realized with that part about the tropics and the polar circle, given coal's role in climate change.  People increasingly see the downsides to being so tied to such a power source.  

Utility regulators and major investors also see that, increasingly declaring that they will take carbon costs into account in reviewing coal projects.  

And it's working.  Of the 159 coal plants under construction or planned last year, dozens have since been rejected, withdrawn, or delayed.

We have reason to hope.

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If you compare our situation to that of 18th-century Britain, we also have so many more tools at our disposal.  

Tools for actually fighting this thing, for substantially reducing our carbon footprints.  Now.    

There are actions that will cost us little or nothing.  Decisions that will even pay us back, with interest.  And technologies that will keep getting cheaper has we scale up to meet our needs.

So many investments in energy efficiency, big and small, clearly save money - good appliances, efficient light bulbs, higher-mileage cars.  It turns out that so does mandating the use of wind and solar and other renewable energy on a larger scale, as 28 states have already done.  Insulation and good building techniques make our houses not only cheaper to operate but also more comfortable.  

And there are so many other tools and opportunities.

We also have tools for communicating and mobilizing, and much greater influence as ordinary citizens than was true two centuries ago in Britain.  On government officials, who have to pay attention to their constituents.  On corporations, as shareholders.  On our peers - think e-mail and FaceBook.

Over many months recently, many of us in Massachusetts pushed for a state global warming bill, a commitment to deal with the problem across all sectors of the economy.  That meant meeting with lawmakers, organizing rallies and petitions, bringing in diverse stakeholders, engaging activists - probably including some of you in this room.  

In July, with one day to go in the legislative session, the legislature passed what is potentially the strongest state global warming bill yet in the U.S.

We have reason to hope.

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Clearly the idea of the importance of dealing with the challenge of climate change -- and of our moral obligation to deal with it -- is not foreign to Unitarian Universalists.  

The UUA 2006 Statement of Conscience on the Threat of Global Warming begins:

As Unitarian Universalists, we are called by our seventh Principle to affirm and promote 'respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part…'

It includes a “Call to Action”:

Affirming that we are of this earth and that humankind has brought about global warming…, we… pledge to ground our missions and ministries in reverence for this earth and responsibility to it as we undertake these personal practices, congregational actions, and advocacy goals…

It goes on to list many opportunities for action:  

    *  Using less energy and generating less waste.
    *  Using and encouraging more renewable energy.
    *  Choosing energy-efficient transportation.
    *  Planting and preserving trees.
    *  Eating lower on the food chain.
    *  Educating ourselves and our children about sustainability.
    *  Pushing for national and global policies to confront global warming.
    *  Joining the Green Sanctuary movement.

I understand that this congregation is already alive to the possibilities.  With Religious Education classes switching from disposable cups to reusable ones, and integrating environmental themes into their “Way Cool Sunday School” days.  With the facilities crew looking at opportunities to save energy and money, in ways that also cut your carbon footprint.  With discussions about the Green Sanctuaries movement.  And in many other ways.

The Statement of Conscience's conclusion sums up the call to action:

Given our human capacity to reflect and act upon our own lives as well as the condition of the world, we accept with humility and determination our responsibility to remedy and mitigate global warming… We undertake this work for the preservation of life on Earth.”

Because of that “interdependent web of all existence” -- and for the sake of generations to come around the globe and right here -- we understand that we have a moral obligation to deal with climate change that is every bit as real as that faced by those 18th-century abolitionist heroes.

And our moral obligation arguably has that added dimension:  the moral obligation to hope, and to act on that hope.  Because we have so much reason for hope.

We know that climate change is real, and serious, and far-reaching.

But we also know that different emission paths make a difference and that we have so many ready tools at our disposal, so that our choices do make a difference.  

We know that, with the Northeast's big part in global warming emissions and our history of innovation, our choices, right here, make a difference.

And we know that, because the costs of inaction would be so much greater than the costs of action, the time to act is now.

Even if climate change is not quite like anything we've faced before, history tells us that we can face up to immense challenges and we can overcome them.

In the face of climate change, we must believe that we can do it again.  We have so much reason to hope, we must hope, and we must act on that hope.